Interesting. Well, I wish them the best. Everyone please avoid CPF bashing, I think we can turn that page now. And of course, huge thanks to all of our friendly and active BLF members that make this an enjoyable place to hang out (most of the time ).
It todayâs world, thatâs kind of surprising and sad, both at the same time.
I would think that BLF would be pulling more coin, but maybe âflashlightsâ are just waning as a hobby?
A lot of nerds arenât vocal.
Chris
I don't trust those numbers.
I wonder which site actually has more traffic.
No offense bud, but this place isnât exactly hopping with activity.
Neither are mine, so I donât care one way, or the other.
Chris
a couple of years ago, the valuation for BLF was 241K and CPF was 242K
I think Reddit, and especially Facebook and Instagram, have captured a lot of flashlight traffic tooâŚ
CPF is sort of the Surefire lovers relic site.
BLF is modders heaven
Insta and Face are $$$ sources for people selling expensive âcustomsâ
(just my opinion, I dont actually use social media myself)
Reddit has a lot of newbie traffic, but the UI of the site is archaic and makes posting pics difficult
if you have an expensive light to sell, CPF has more high end buyers than BudgetLF
Suddenly âred bootsâ pops in my head, for what reason I know not what.
242K⌠rather specific number. Why not 250K?
CPF was once an amazing place. But it was all about the membership. Various changes caused many people to walk. I think their Draconian rules on reselling shut out a lot of folks. I go back there on occasion and itâs pretty much people talking old-school⌠Malkoff. McGizmo. Surefire. Still some people kicking around with an incan fetish. But for some reason, the way upper end of custom flashlights is alive there. Folks who drop $1k for a light without batting an eye. Tritium eye candy galore that would make you wonder how much cheaper the light was than the tritium. Unobtanium customs for the weekend Porsche and Lamborghini drivers. Yet, the old BBS software? I guess itâs nostalgia⌠Yet, no surprise that traffic has been waning.
I have no clue what people took over for CPF management. I donât know what they think they can do with it. Given the traffic of BLF, isnât this like âthe place to beâ for hobbyist LED flashlight concerns? I donât know what more they could offer, or if they could even pull away traffic from BLF.
Bottom line â Lumintop partnered with the BLF community to produce an amazing light. I donât think CPF ever achieved that. So, itâll be interesting to see what âangleâ CPF takes going forward.
jon_slider nailed it my fellow flashlight friend
Interesting site, cutecounter. So if we sold BLF we could buy around 4,200 Convoy S2+ lights and distribute them to dark countries. :)
Kinda sad to see that TuCows is the registrar.
I do think Reddit and Facebook have both taken a lot of traffic. Different platforms for different folks. Too much chaff on Reddit (I do enjoy a few other subs there and the r/flashlight is a good place mostly). Seems like forums in general just get a lot less participation these days. Maybe because short text and insta-this-insta-that are about what many can handle and writing/reading are more effort (and I don't mean that in a negative way necessarily).
I did Reddit HiFi 20+ years ago and quickly left. Too progressive and a low signal to noise ratio. I doubt that the progressive commie types are into boutique lights, or even modding cheap shit, but thatâs just a guess on my part?
Hobbies ebb and flow and the killer flashlights were a thing a decade ago, but for here, itâsâmoddingâ and thatâs a small subset of the âflashlight whole.â
Chris
If DM51 is still a mod there, I sure wonât be going back. And indeed, I suppose I wouldnât go anyway.
Isnât this at least the second or third time? I remember being on CPF then years later it was totally changed and I had to re-register and it just wasnât ass good as it was before (they even switched bbâs. Think it happened a third time. But the original CPF was great.
Youâve been here for one day and youâre wondering why CPF is in trouble?
Chris
Iâm still there, after 15 years. I never had trouble but I can see how some might. Itâs still a nostalgic trip for me as itâs where my hobby started. I did most of my reviews there too. But unfortunately itâs a bit of a shell now. Still nice to visit but not a place to hang out a lot.
CPF looks uglier than before, and still on downhill route.
One really positive thing i see is ability to upload pics, former pic posting policy was PIA.
oh come on, itâs much better now.
The old forum was very slow and 1990-looking, and lacking a lot of basic functionality from newer forums.
This forum is on the same path as well.
It still uses Drupal 7 which had end-of-life like 15 years ago, with some forum module that is likely not maintained anymore, thatâs why an upgrade would require programming work.
And even the latest Drupal is on the path to its death, along with PHP hopefully. We have multicore processors for years. These outdated languages were made for single-cpu, single-thread era. There are modern languages that natively support multi-threading, and with a much better syntax as well.
For websites multithreading is not necessary. Makes more sense for backend services. But websites have a lot of parallel requests. Webservers usually work with a worker thread pool accepting the requests and delegating the script execution to another thread pool that runs the php processes and does all the work. So even with âoutdated phpâ you have most of the benefits of parallel execution.
Websites are not just âwebsitesâ anymore.
Itâs true that you only need it for the back-end (doh), but what it is more efficient, to spawn a PHP process for each visitor from Apache, php-fpm or whatever, and run out of memory after 100 concurrent visits, or handle this efficiently in the language itself ?
And what if you need to do some image processing, its not uncommon for people to upload images. Wouldnât it be better to be able to have full control over that in the most efficient way?
No idea what infrastructure sb is using but autoscaling is so easy today that running out of memory should only happen when you run out of money